If someone tells you they found ‘a couple of’ typos in a text, what does this actually mean? In my experience, this can mean anything between one or two, and “actually, the text was riddled with typos”. It can also refer to “I write data is“, “I spell it color”, or “I prefer US, not U.S.”, ignoring diversity in spelling…
Country selection
How many times have you been asked to justify the country selection when the country selected was the US or the UK? And how many times you think it is when it is Ghana, Botswana, or Bolivia?
Colour Wars?
I know that there are many opinions around about colours in scientific graphs. I have followed the recommendations (and colours) by Paul Tol, finding the argument about readability and attention to colour-blind readers convincing. Indeed, I’ve commented on these things to colleagues, always with an open mind as to the exact aesthetics. I know, for example, that many swear by ColorBrewer.
Recently, however, I got a comment by a reviewer who disliked my choice of colours strongly enough to comment on. We can discuss the quality of the figure, but it was particularly the colours the reviewer picked on and the difficulty of distinguishing them (something Paul Tol optimizes). While the recommendation of the lovely viridis palette was probably misguided (we’re talking about categorical data, not continuous data), it made me wonder whether we’re entering an age where attention to colours (in principle a good thing) has become so strong and opinionated that we start arguing about which colours we should use in plots — not what we communicate…
Reviewer feedback
I engage in peer review as a service to the scientific community. I do so despite the fact that many commercial publishers benefit greatly (financially) from my doing so. While some call peer reviewing activities “free labour”, I see it as a part of my job — which makes the commercial publishers exploiting the taxpayer rather than me personally (perhaps a face-saving narrative).
But there’s a limit, please. Here’s a recent mail I received:
You recently completed a review for [journal name].
We are keen to receive your feedback regarding your experiences. Your responses will be used to help improve the services currently offered to you, and will not be passed onto any third parties or used for marketing purposes. It will take approximately 10-12 minutes to complete this survey.
You can spin it all you want, but I am doing you a service, not the other way around. You see, I have nothing to hide here, so I am sharing this with any interested third parties. I find it fulfilling to think (pretend?) that my comments and observations on a written article help to make it more useful to the scientific community, and with that to society. This didn’t quite take me 10-12 minutes, and probably doesn’t answer the questions in this survey (I couldn’t be bothered to click).
Despite the spin, the third party here is you, the commercial publisher trying to control the publishing process from start to finish.
The aim of the research is to understand how satisfied you are with the relationship and service provided by [the journal] and its online review platform.
That relationship? It’s actually quite simple: you ask for a review, which I provide for the sake of the scientific community, despite who you are.
Your Paper Your Way
Can we have more of these, please?
We now differentiate between the requirements for new and revised submissions. You may choose to submit your manuscript as a single Word or PDF file to be used in the refereeing process. Only when your paper is at the revision stage, will you be requested to put your paper in to a ‘correct format’ for acceptance and provide the items required for the publication of your article.
Didier Ruedin 